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Government Leader home > June 2005 issue
June 2005; Vol. 1 No. 2
RECEIPTS SCANNER PUTS YOUR EXPENSES IN ORDER
By John Breeden II
In government, most people don’t like to
leave a paper trail—unless, of course, it
leads to getting reimbursed for expenses.
The NeatReceipts scanner and software
package from NeatReceipts of Philadelphia
can help. The hardware consists of a singlepage
scanner 10.5 inches long and 1.5 inches
wide that can easily slip into a computer bag
along with your notebook or digital camera.
The scanner plugs into a notebook or desktop
PC with a USB cable. It easily handles the
narrow receipts you get most often, though it
also can scan full-size sheets of paper.
And you don’t have to worry about plugging
it in; it draws the power it needs from the USB
cable.
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| | NeatReceipts scans images of your receipts but can also use OCR to transfer data into a spreadsheet. | |
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Once set up, you simply feed receipts into the
scanner by hand. On the road, you could set it
up in a hotel room beside a laptop, scan
receipts when you return to your room, and
work with them later if needed.
Receipts scan surprisingly quickly. Standard
restaurant receipts of about three inches flow
through in less than five seconds, so you can
scan an entire day’s worth of receipts in about
a minute.
The scanner makes perfect copies of the
receipts and arranges them on a page in either
Adobe PDF or Microsoft Word format. There is
also a NeatReceipts format
if you don’t have
an office-type program.
You can even
arrange them
on an HTML
page if you need to post receipts online as part of
a tracking system.
The software also can use optical character
recognition—with about 95 percent accuracy—
and then drop key values into an Excel
spreadsheet. The program is pretty good at figuring
out where all the fields go in the document--
it almost always got the date field correct
and the amount paid—and was able to
handle folded or crumpled receipts.
The system has a government price of $225
and can be purchased from NeatReceipts at
www.neatreceipts.com.
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